In many circumstances, entrepreneurship can be unproductive: where it involves innovations in rent-seeking, for instance, or discovering unused but effective legal gambits to deploy against competitors. Today, the patent system offers many opportunities for these kinds of ‘unproductive entrepreneurship’; patents can reinforce monopolies and intensify abuse of market power, block the diffusion of knowledge and follow-on innovations, and make it easier to privatize research that is publicly funded and collectively created.
